[openstack-dev] [deployment] [oslo] [ansible] [tripleo] [kolla] [helm] Configuration management with etcd / confd

Jiří Stránský jistr at redhat.com
Mon Jun 12 12:02:02 UTC 2017


On 9.6.2017 18:51, Flavio Percoco wrote:
> A-ha, ok! I figured this was another option. In this case I guess we would
> have 2 options:
> 
> 1. Run confd + openstack service in side the container. My concern in this
> case
> would be that we'd have to run 2 services inside the container and structure
> things in a way we can monitor both services and make sure they are both
> running. Nothing impossible but one more thing to do.

I see several cons with this option:

* Even if we do this in a sidecar container like Bogdan mentioned (which 
is better than running 2 "top-level" processes in a single container 
IMO), we still have to figure out when to restart the main service, 
IIUC. I see confd in daemon mode listens on the backend change and 
updates the conf files, but i can't find a mention that it would be able 
to restart services. Even if we implemented this auto-restarting in 
OpenStack services, we need to deal with services like MariaDB, Redis, 
..., so additional wrappers might be needed to make this a generic solution.

* Assuming we've solved the above, if we push a config change to etcd, 
all services get restarted at roughly the same time, possibly creating 
downtime or capacity issues.

* It complicates the reasoning about container lifecycle, as we have to 
start distinguishing between changes that don't require a new container 
(config change only) vs. changes which do require it (image content 
change). Mutable container config also hides this lifecycle from the 
operator -- the container changes on the inside without COE knowing 
about it, so any operator's queries to COE would look like no changes 
happened.

I think ideally container config would be immutable, and every time we 
want to change anything, we'd do that via a roll out of a new set of 
containers. This way we have a single way of making changes to reason 
about, and when we're doing rolling updates, it shouldn't result in a 
downtime or tangible performance drop. (Not talking about migrating to a 
new major OpenStack release, which will still remain a special case in 
foreseeable future.)

> 
> 2. Run confd `-onetime` and then run the openstack service.

This sounds simpler both in terms of reasoning and technical complexity, 
so if we go with confd, i'd lean towards this option. We'd have to 
rolling-replace the containers from outside, but that's what k8s can 
take care of, and at least the operator can see what's happening on high 
level.

The issues that Michał mentioned earlier still remain to be solved -- 
config versioning ("accidentally" picking up latest config), and how to 
supply config elements that differ per host.

Also, it's probably worth diving a bit deeper into comparing `confd 
-onetime` and ConfigMaps...


Jirka

> 
> 
> Either would work but #2 means we won't have config files monitored and the
> container would have to be restarted to update the config files.
> 
> Thanks, Doug.
> Flavio
> 
> 
> 
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